“Stay back.” She grabbed for the poker. “Back!”
He backed away with slow, even steps. His heart cracked as she crumpled to the ground. Desperately, he glanced about the room. On top of the cabinet at his side he spotted a decanter of sherry. With a shaking hand, he poured a measure into a glass. Then, tentatively, he approached her huddled form.
He came to his knees—a plea and a prayer. “For you.” He stretched out his arm, offering her the drink. Her gaze moved from the sherry to his face and then back. Cautiously, she held out her hand. Their fingers brushed as she took the glass. He shivered from neck to toes.
He had come to Southford thinking he would be giving her a gift—a magical hand capable of raising her from infamy and restoring her to the world where she belonged. How wrong he’d been. It was she who’d been the gift. She who had righted wrongs he hadn’t even acknowledged.
Not only is such an alliance cruel, it will destroy you both.
He’d thought his mother’s words a curse. But they hadn’t been a curse, had they? They’d been a warning. A warning he’d failed to heed. Now, when it was too late, he had only one thing he could grant Katherine—her freedom.
The worst thing he could imagine was to let her go.
His throat dried. His muscles screamed in protest. But love, stark and painful, lent him awful courage—the courage to charge straight into the heart of his own destruction.
“I will leave,” he whispered, “if you wish me to leave.”
Something frightening flickered within her eyes. She turned away, staring into the fire for an interminable time, a war playing out beneath her skin. Hope and desperation tangled in his chest—cracks ran along his veins, threatening to break him into pieces.
What was the truth now?
There was only one.
“I love you,” he said.
Her head snapped up. Rage replaced the hollowness in her eyes.
“At which point did that happen?Hmm?When did you progress from seduction to true sentiment?”
When? How could he know? “It happened in small measures, but it happened just the same.”
She tossed back the rest of the sherry all at once, and stared blankly into the empty glass. He removed the empty sherry glass from her hands and drew them into his. He pressed his lips to her knuckles.Cold.
“I love you,” he repeated, broken. “Please give me the chance to prove it to you. I swear I will never lie to you again.”
She blinked at their joined hands as if they belonged to someone else, a dreadful echo of their encounter in the billiards room.
“Words,” she said. “Beautiful words,sotempting to trust.” She looked him in the eye. “Tell me the truth. The day I told you I had anticipated my vows, tell me—and remember you’ve just sworn never to lie to me again—would you have shown such understanding if I hadn’t possessed Langley blood, the one thing you needed to assuage your honor?”
God help him.
“No.” He gritted his teeth. “I would have kept my distance.”
She tugged on her hands. “I suspected as much.”
He held fast. “And,” he continued significantly, “I would have been in the wrong. For my foolishness, I would have remained lost in darkness. I would have missed the luminous gem within the mine.”
She glanced to heaven and groaned. “Lies.”
“No!” Didn’t she understand? Couldn’t she see?
He’dchanged, damnation.
To show her the truth, he cut through the center of everything he’d once held dear.
“I am,” he continued, “by law and by tradition, the Marquess of Bromton. But even if I’d been legitimate, my life would always have been a lie, but for you. You are the only truth worth fighting for.”
“Stop,” she said. “Just stop.”
